Analyzing consensus in multi-mode real-time communication using history information

Abstract

State consistency in safety-critical distributed systems is mandatory for synchronizing distributed decisions as found in dynamic time division multiple access (TDMA) schedules in the presence of faults. A dynamic TDMA schedule that supports multi-mode communication is sensitive to transient faults because stations can make incorrect local decisions at run time and cause state inconsistency. Faulty decisions are especially undesirable for safety-critical systems with hard real-time constraints. Therefore, real-time communication schedules must have the capability of detecting state inconsistency within a fixed amount of time. In this work, a reliable state consistency checking mechanism is proposed that uses history information for achieving superior goodput in comparison to the well-known controller state (C-State) based CRC approach and the two phase commit (2PC) protocol.